Field
The present disclosure relates to network design. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a method and system for managing configuration of devices in a network.
Related Art
The relentless growth of the Internet has brought with it an insatiable demand for bandwidth. As a result, equipment vendors race to build larger, faster, and more versatile switches to move traffic. However, the size of a switch cannot grow infinitely. It is limited by physical space, power consumption, and design complexity, to name a few factors. More importantly, because an overly large system often does not provide economy of scale due to its complexity, simply increasing the size and throughput of a switch may prove economically unviable due to the increased per-port cost.
One way to increase the throughput of a switch system is to use switch stacking. In switch stacking, multiple smaller-scale, identical switches are interconnected in a special pattern to form a larger logical switch. However, switch stacking requires careful configuration of the ports and inter-switch links. The amount of required manual configuration becomes prohibitively complex and tedious when the stack reaches a certain size, which precludes switch stacking from being a practical option in building a large-scale switching system. Furthermore, a system based on stacked switches often has topology limitations which restrict the scalability of the system due to fabric bandwidth considerations.
In addition, modern-day datacenters often include heterogeneous servers, switches, and storage devices manufactured by different vendors. Configuration changes on one of these devices usually result in configuration changes at other devices. It is conceivable that a change at a device may create a cascade of changes across a number of datacenter devices. Furthermore, the evolution of virtual computing has placed additional requirements on the network. For example, as the locations of virtual servers become more mobile and dynamic, it is often desirable that the network configuration can respond to these changes in a timely fashion. However, at present, there are no readily applicable solutions that can achieve this goal without using proprietary communication protocols.